Sijilmasa, the gate of the gold road

The northern gate of the trans-Saharan gold road, now under excavation

Sijilmasa was the northern gate of the trans-Saharan gold trade. Founded in 757 on the east bank of the Wadi Ziz at the desert's edge in what is now the Draa-Tafilalet region of Morocco, beside modern Rissani, it stood for six hundred and thirty six years and was abandoned in 1393.

Its whole reason for existing was position. It was the point where camel caravans out of West Africa unloaded, and the main entry for West African exports into Morocco: ivory, enslaved people, and above all gold, going out against textiles, ceramics and manufactured goods coming south. When medieval Europe talked about the fabulous wealth of the Sudan, that wealth reached the Mediterranean through this oasis.

The archaeology has caught up with the story in the last few years, and the single best find is one object. Excavation has uncovered the city's MINT, and with it a ceramic mould used to cast the blanks for Sijilmasan dinars, still impregnated with gold residue. It is the only such find in Morocco and the second known in Africa. That is not a text describing a gold trade. That is the actual tooling, with the gold still in it.

Work has run in phases since the 1960s, with an American-Moroccan team through the 1990s, a French-Moroccan mission from 2012, and the largest campaign since the 1970s carried out by Morocco's INSAP across 2024 and 2025 over roughly eight thousand square metres, reaching layers from the sixth to the eighteenth century, including what has been reported as the country's oldest mosque.

Go via Rissani, which inherited the trade and still runs one of the best souks in the south. The ruins are just outside it, and the palm groves along the Ziz are the reason a city could exist here at all. Stand in it late in the day and the geography explains itself: green behind you, and in front of you nothing for two thousand kilometres.